From the Kansas Museum of History website:
"Even well into the 20th century, the U.S. Army relied heavily on horses and mules to move equipment. Surprisingly, though, veterinarians are a fairly recent addition to our military. In this podcast, you'll hear about a World War I veteran's uniform worn by a veterinarian.
From PBS:
Through interviews with veterans, historians, and ethicists from all the countries engaged in World War II, this American Experience recounts the story of the Anglo-American bombing campaign against Germany, exploring the moral conundrums imposed by the reality of the war.
From the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission website:
"William A. Frazier, editor of Ready, Booted and Spurred: Arkansas in the U.S.-Mexican War, discusses the impact of Mexican War veterans on the Civil War in Arkansas."
This short, accessible presentation, created in connection with the History Channel and the Library of Congress's Take a Veteran to School Day, looks at what a veteran is, which wars American veterans have fought in, the history of Veterans Day, and the experiences of veterans alive today.
Though not a critical look at American history, it provides an introduction to the U.S.'s participation in wars and the concepts of service to the country and memorialization of service. It might also be contrasted with more critical looks at wartime service in U.S. history, or analyzed for its use of patriotic imagery.
A collection of more than 200 official documents, nine oral histories, and more than 70 photographs pertaining to the pursuance of the Korean War by the administrations of Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Provides day-by-day access covering June 24-September 14, 1950—and more sporadic contributions during subsequent periods—to diplomatic and military documents and accounts by administration officials, including correspondence, speeches, memos, reports, and briefing papers. A special section covers the historic Wake Island meeting in October 1950 between Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, with excerpted documents, reminiscences by participants and observers, and photographs. Also includes an audio recording of Truman discussing the firing of MacArthur in 1951; an extensive "Korean War Teacher Activity" from a high school in Independence, MO, including assignments geared to official documents and oral histories; guides to archival materials in the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries; information on relevant exhibitions in the libraries; and links to five related sites. Valuable for students to learn to evaluate historical narratives composed of materials from diverse sources.
This website is focused on exploring and teaching the history of Brooklyn and Brooklyn's people during the Civil War through primary sources, essays, and instructional materials. More than 100 primary sources focus on Brooklyn's role in the Civil War, including letters, maps, newspaper articles, photographs, and illustrations. Additionally, the document collection can be explored through four thematic presentations on soldiers, women, slavery, and daily life. Each presentation features a short introduction and each document is accompanied by a brief description and links to related material.
Lesson plans, available as word or .pdf documents include 11 on soldiers, six on slavery, eight on women, and nine on daily life. There are also links to the Brooklyn Public Library's lists of books and related websites, resources for children, and resources for teenagers. An interactive map and timeline are also available. A useful resource for those teaching or researching Brooklyn, NY, or northern states during the Civil War.
The U.S. Army provides forces for national defense and the protection of national resources, as well as the support of civil authorities and the logistics of other military branches, as needed.
Although the Army website appears to favor current events and media, it does provide a number of historical resources. Primary sources available include veteran oral histories, army regulations, and photographs dating from the late 19th-century through present. Historical photographs can be compared to recent images, within the Army's main media gallery.
Other resources provided include archives of Soldier magazine from 2001 through present; an artifact of the month feature; full texts and excerpts on military history, divided by time period; artworks, including posters which appear to have been created for the classroom; and a wide variety of multimedia presentations. Presentation topics include the Battle of Gettysburg; the centennial of Army aviation; D-Day; Operation Arkansas; occupied Japan; and separate features for African Americans, Native Americans, Asian and Pacific Americans, Hispanic Americans, and women in the Army.
If you wish to take your class on a field trip, the website provides a list of Army museums.
What do the elements of the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, symbolize? Is the design effective? Who was the memorial built for? Christopher Hamner and Michael O'Malley try to answer these questions by contrasting the memorial with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Christopher Hamner: You can’t really understand the World War II Monument, where it is and why it looks the way it looks, without understanding the Vietnam Memorial and the story of getting it built. The design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was open to everybody. It eventually got more than 1,400 submissions. They were handled anonymously so that the judging panels saw only the design and a numbered code and they went on 1,400 down to 300 down to 30 down to the winner who was very surprising when it was revealed. It was a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale named Maya Lin.
Michael O’Malley: Problematic is so many ways.
Christopher Hamner:: Youth, ethnicity, gender. And it was the design that’s very close to what we now see on the Mall. One of the reasons that I suspect the World War II Monument looks the way that it looks, which is much more traditional, heroic, sort of celebratory. It seems to privilege sort of consensus and unity above everything else. [It] has to do with the desire to avoid that kind of controversy. One of the things that we pointed out was the fact that the ring of stones that sort of marks the outer boundary that are adorned with wreaths are dedicated to the states.
Michael O’Malley: Which makes no sense. The state-iness was not part of the World War II experience.
Christopher Hamner: Of all the ways you could possibly cut up World War II—
Michael O’Malley: It’s not like all the guys from Delaware were in one unit. They got drafted, they went down to some camp in the South and then they went back. I mean their was no state-iness attached to it.
Christopher Hamner: It’s a national effort to the extent that people identify with some smaller segment, it’s usually by branch or then by division. There are other ways that you could group it, but the one that makes the least sense is the states. It’s incredibly traditional, it’s white, there are wreaths, there’s a gold star at one end for every 500 combat deaths.
Michael O’Malley: So they want to have some element of what the Vietnam War Memorial does so well, which is individualizing. Really made graphic the extent of the loss. They want to have some element of that—
Christopher Hamner: But they don’t particularize it quite as effectively and that some of the teachers that we toured with said that that element of it had sort of fallen flat, that it did not—
Michael O’Malley: You actually came away thinking less people died in World War II than in Vietnam.
Christopher Hamner: I found as I walked around I spent probably half my time trying to figure out what the organizational strategy was. They were not in alphabetical order, they were not in the order the states joined the Union, they’re not grouped together. I mean I couldn’t tell. It didn’t look to me like it was sort of by population or the sort of number of soldiers from that state who perished over the course of the war and I started to suspect that it was just random.
Michael O’Malley: I mean the Vietnam Memorial takes a few elements and loads them with meaning. This thing takes a lot of elements and bleeds the meaning out of them.
Christopher Hamner: We also talked about the Korean War Memorial, which is a sort of interesting combination, right? That it’s particularized and personalized and that it’s slightly larger-than-life-size figures of soldiers that are in ponchos. They’re spread out and kind of making their way across a field but they’re not heroic in the way that soldiers a century ago would have been portrayed. You can feel the weight of the gear that they carry.
Michael O’Malley: And that wants to put you in the midst of it, I mean you walk through them. You’re right in the middle of that, so, where as in the World War II Memorial you’re in the middle of kind of nothing, you’re in the middle of some kind of empty abstraction.
Christopher Hamner: It has become more participatory at least during the daytime than it had been before because there are so many World War II veterans who are designated, who are kind of milling around the areas and who will engage with visitors and pose for photographs and talk about their experience so there is a sort of participatory dimension to it. But as Mike pointed out, these guys won’t be around forever, that cannot last.
Michael O’Malley: That’s an element of this thing that we got to in the discussion. There were some great questions, like who was this thing for? And there was really a sense that this was for veterans. Like this is here to make veterans feel good. It’s not about the nation remembering something. It’s a gift to veterans. I have nothing against giving gifts to veterans, but is that the purpose of a memorial? That’s a worthwhile question. And when the veterans are gone, what do you have? You have a gift for a person who is no longer around. It’s an odd construction of memorialization.
IWitness is a free resource developed by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute to help students develop a deeper understanding of 20th-century history alongside digital and media literacies. It houses approximately 1,000 Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies and allows students to construct multimedia projects using the testimonies. Users need only an Internet connection; all of the tools—including an online video editor—are self-contained on the server and are compatible with both Macs and PCs.
In order to start using IWitness, click here and select “register.” Once registered, you will be able to create classes and generate access codes students can use to register.
Even prior to registering, the IWitness home page features a rotating group of curated clips. These short clips run less than five minutes and draw learners into compelling stories. Linked from the home page, the Browse All Topics page provides more clips from a breadth of topics to anyone visiting the site. Registered users are able to search among more than 1,000 full-length testimonies, then save clips from the testimonies for use in projects. Testimonies have been indexed to the minute with keywords. If, for example, students search for “music,” they will get a list of clips where the interviewee discusses music, and they can go right to the exact minute in which music is discussed in a testimony. Users also can narrow search results in various ways.
Once signed in, you should go to your “Dashboard” to get started exploring IWitness. From here you will notice videos located on the left side under “Connections.” The Connections videos will help you address important topics with your students: ethical editing of video clips, effective searching, and defining terms like “archive” and “testimony.” There is an Educators page designed to orient teachers to the site and highlight available resources. There is also a resource tab on the top of the screen with links to reliable information. For students and teachers alike, IWitness offers a Tool Kit, which can fly out from the right side of the screen. The Tool Kit provides users with quick access to their assigned activities, as well as to an encyclopedia, glossary, and note-taking tool.
IWitness has numerous activities you can assign to your students. More than 200 activities are available in several languages and cover an array of subjects from the Holocaust and genocide to cinema and media & digital literacy. Different types of activities present information in diverse formats and can be filtered for different age or subject levels. “Information Quest”, for example, focuses on a single survivor or witness of the Holocaust. Students listen carefully for information in testimony clips and then reflect on their learning by using, among other things, a world cloud tool. As an educator, you are also able to build your own activities for your students in IWitness with the “Activity Builder”. The additional resources offered on the “Resources” page provide bibliographies, glossaries, and timelines that may be useful when assigning activities for students to build or complete.
Teachers are using IWitness as a way to integrate 21st-century literacies into a range of subjects, including social studies, language arts, media studies, psychology, and more. One history teacher built an IWitness activity so his students could compare and contrast the Hollywood portrayal of the Sobibor Uprising in film with how survivors of the event remember and describe it. Through his IWitness activity “Escape From Sobibor: Hollywood and Memory,” his students were able to use critical thinking as they watched testimony and compared it to the film, then select clips of that testimony to construct a more historical depiction of daily life in the concentration camp.
You can also use IWitness to help teach online etiquette and respectful dialogue skills. Within IWitness, students finish their activities by viewing and commenting on their classmates’ projects. This is a great way to spark conversation that can continue in IWitness through social-media-style commenting tools. Teachers are able to mediate conversations and communicate with students within the application. IWitness also provides reminders to students about good digital citizenship when communicating with their peers within the site. IWitness allows students to learn about important events in the 20th century while creating meaningful projects and making connections with their own lives.
Want to learn more about IWitness? See Teachinghistory.org's Website Review for more information.
Looking for more resources on the Holocaust? Teachinghistory.org has gathered website reviews, lesson plans, teaching strategies, and more on the Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust spotlight page.